|
|
 Memento mori Kaspars Groševs, Artist | |
| “One time someone gave me a photo of themselves and said: – Here’s a picture of me when I was younger. – Every picture of you is of when you were younger.”(1) Around the time when the Amen break rythms(2) and the deep bass thudding had finally made their way to the dark buildings of Riga housing estates, those once intoxicated by jungle music in Great Britain, its place of origin, had already moved on. Thereafter, an unknown number of people in the London of 1994 now and then mentioned an accurate 150 heartbeats per minute, and a just as undefined number of people spent the year 1996 with the word “massive” on their tongues, but a few years later, the crackling sounds of radio on both sides of the Daugava announced that we were surrounded by jungle, drums and bass. The ninety minute cassette was ready – on pause. When Lee Gamble decided to reminisce about previous years, he caught himself drumming on the table with his fingers. Possibly, some incidental, once heard piece of music made him remember the time when he was a teenage DJ carried away by jungle music. Whatever, having collated a couple of stretches of time in a twenty seven minute collage, he gave it the title Diversions 1994–1996, in memory of the days which were once spent in smoky pirate radio rooms, digging through the pseudonyms and the sounds which were hidden behind them. Gamble, who had up till then been known as a radical computer music artist, initially created the recording for a radio broadcast for which he was asked to prepare a reconstituted DJ set. He decided to seek out his old, beaten up cassettes with jungle mixes, in the end taking very few of them and using mainly short and jerky fragments of music. Ghostly synthesizer sounds, from who knows where, rhythmically wheeze throughout the record’s A and B sides, at times yielding to the beat of the bass, stray voices or the broken fragments of rhythm. The music of Gamble’s youth, having lost its tempo and clarity, drowns in the cassette’s hissing and the incertitude accompanying it. On misty holiday mornings, when together with friends we headed to the stuffy rooms of the local housing estate nightclub, still a little clammy after Friday’s brawls and dancing, we had a very clear plan: to waste all of our pocket money and afterwards quickly forget about it. The distributors of pirated compact discs gathered there, surpassing even the regular traders at the Central Market with the range of what they had on offer. With a bit of luck, somewhere between the poodle-heads and Latin lovers there’d be the sickly smiling visage of an Aphex Twin, while buried right down the bottom there possibly were Photek and Metalheadz tapes, which were selected for their visual appeal, as there weren’t any other sources of reference at that time. In leather jackets and light-coloured jeans, shoulder to shoulder, a gang of youths is idly strolling along the streets, each of them like a mirror image of the one next to him. In Mark Leckey’s video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) they are, with a police siren sounding in the background, matter-of-factly(3) heading somewhere, and it seems that they have a goal. A quick glance at the camera, and they continue to stay silent about their intentions.(4) But the video opens with a scene from a large dance hall, in which the voluminous hairstyles, flared trousers and platform heels reveal that it’s a completely different decade. With the dancers attempting to levitate above the dance floor, the airy dance steps unite the tens or perhaps even hundreds hidden somewhere in the VHS cassette’s wobbly haze. As the work continues, the clothes become tighter, then – more ascetic, and in the end – very colourful and sweat stained, and it seems that the dancers through their movements move time forwards. They don’t do this alone – the mirror behind them turns out to be just another stranger. It seems that Gamble, who over the past fifteen years has been carried away with the ideas of digital synthesis and abstractions of everything that’s passed, simply disappeared one day and reappeared again – just the same, but a little different. The nostalgic moaning which sometimes can be heard in smoky bars in place of background music, became an ally in the matters of chance which took place with Lee Gamble. Since its release, the short soundtrack which has left plenty of space for the crackles of silence on its 12 inch record, has been played often – in chilly cafes, in messy apartments, on public transport and other places where people choose to measure the passing of time with music. The A side – 13 minutes, the B side – 14 minutes, the last stop, sunset, there’s 28 days in February this year. Gamble has succeeded with an accidental elegy to rave culture, which is recalled even by those who don’t know where they were in 1992. In the last scenes of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a white triangle is fluttering above the clouds coloured by the sunset and pierced by the invisible signals sent from a pirate radio station. However, time doesn’t stop after Leckey’s video finishes, just like the hardcore mentioned in the title that, in the moment before sunset, gets repeated exactly 11 times, until it dies away in the buzzing of the magnetic tape. Dancers at dance parties continue to communicate without words, and Fiorucci jeans are still overly expensive. But Leckey’s video, in contrast to the unexpected popularity of the Diversions 1994–1996 recording, stands by itself, even though it’s full of the past. Every time I watch it, a calming thought comes to mind that since the previous occasion, time has moved on. Sometimes it even feels as if I’m watching a new version of this work (and Mark Leckey is quietly sitting behind the wall, montaging together the next variation(5)), whereas the jungle music of Gamble’s recording, as it was in 1994, still hasn’t come back to life and its remains continue to haunt somewhere, extremely close to the end of history. Mark Leckey’s video can be watched on: ej.uz/fiorucci. Translation into English: Uldis Brūns (1) This was a joke told by American comedian Mitch Hedberg, visibly intoxicated and wearing dark sunglasses, in the late 1990s. News of his death from a drug overdose was publicly announced on 1 April 2005, and many didn’t believe it. (2) The drum loop known as the Amen break has become one of the most often used electronic music samples. It is mostly associated with jungle and drum’n’bass music genres. The loop itself and its name were taken from the 1969 single of Amen, Brother by The Winstons. (3) British football hooligans who wear seemingly casual but expensive European brand clothes are known as casuals. This subculture appeared at the end of the 1970s, after Liverpool football club fans had accompanied their team on a European tour. The fine French and Italian designer clothes (Lacoste, Ellesse, Fiorucci, Ralph Lauren and others) they acquired there (usually illegally) became the casuals’ sign of recognition which initially only the police knew about. “The police view was that the casuals’ style of dress was a crafty way for the hooligans to hide their intentions during a football match.” (Leckey, Mark. 7 Windmill Street W1. Zürich: Miros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2004, p. 18). (4) In the video Leckey used a large amount of archival materials or found footage from dance events and raves, including material from the police in which potential ‘disturbers of the peace’ were identified. (5) In 2012, Mark Leckey finally released an audio version of his work in which, in addition to the Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore sound track, he also included the sound track from the GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010) video installation. Leckey’s record was released in limited numbers, only 500 copies, and can be purchased at boomkat.com, the same as Lee Gamble’s release. | |
| go back | |
